They're in every class you have ever tried to sit through. They make it difficult to pay attention, either by making you laugh or making you exasperated. They're easy to pick out within the first five minutes of class because they're loud and unavoidable. They are the class clowns. In our Microeconomics class, it's unmistakably Edward, and so this paper is about the external costs that he places on the rest of the class.
Surely the children who are the class clowns in college have been that way through all of their previous years of education, and no doubt have been making it difficult for fellow students to learn for approximately 16 years. Obviously these fellow students have been incurring the private costs as well as the social costs caused by the class clown. Since we are in an economics class, I propose two methods to help Edward keep his mouth shut.
The first is that we place a tax on Edward whenever he makes an out-of-nowhere comment, so that he will not be so inclined to make them and the social cost will therefore be lowered for the entire class. However, we must take into account that every now and then he does make a valid statement, or a helpful question, and perhaps these should be subsidized in the way of trading. For example, whenever he makes a good comment, it cancels out one of the silly ones he made, and at the end of the month we tax him for all the bad ones that came out of his mouth. You also have to consider that perhaps this habit could have been broken at an earlier age by teachers in elementary school grades, so if this experiment works well on Edward, it should possibly be implemented on teachers in kindergarten and other primary grades. Both of these taxing option are shown in Figure 1.
Another option for getting Edward to not make so many asinine comments is to start the class with a limit of how many he's allowed to make and have other people in the class buy the rights to those comments from him.
